The Temple of Liberty held probably nearly two hundred persons, and it was quite full. We three were among the earliest arrivals, and occupied the front seat directly facing the platform. I noticed that there was a large number of decently-clad working men present, some with earnest faces, who had evidently come with the intention of arguing matters out in a certain sense fairly. Many members of the new Working-man's League were also present, and these were prepared to support their officers through thick and thin. The chief of these officers and the principal speaker among them was the Secretary, Mark Mallard, who was voted to the chair. He was a common-looking man between fifty and sixty years of age, and his face bore strong marks of a life's discontent of mind; a man, thought I, who would be envious of his neighbour's ox, but too indolent to work for that which he envied. The unfavourable opinion I formed of him became strengthened as I studied the signs in his face: he was evidently an unfit man to be a leader in any good cause. But he could speak in a fairly-fluent style and with a certain rough readiness which found favour with many among his audience. He was not eloquent, but ready-tongued, and from long practice, as I judged, knew how to make such use of his materials as would best please the kind of assemblage he was addressing now. He first proceeded to give a brief account of the establishment in the neighbourhood of the new Working-man's League, a branch, he said, of a greater institution which was to set everything right for the working man--and by the working man he meant the poor man. Throughout the whole of the proceedings he placed idle poverty and honest labour on one pedestal, and sought to prove--and did prove to many only too ready to believe--how the poor man was ground down, oppressed, and crushed by the 'ruthless' heel of the rich. The Working-man's League would seek to bring about a different state of things; its aim was to give the working man the rights which were unlawfully denied to him in the present condition of things, and to prove that the real power of the nation lay in labour, and not in capital. This, of course, was received with cheers. The orator showed no originality either in his propositions or in his mode of placing them before his hearers; but they were none the less enthusiastically received on that account. Fairly sifted and summed up, his utterances amounted to nothing more than the usual declamation concerning the rich and the poor, and the atrocious injustice of a state of things which allows one man to have more money in his purse than another. The old platitudes which cling to the vexed subject came trippingly off his tongue. If, he said, the real power of the country lay in labour and not in capital, then labour should govern the country; but to show the unfairness of things, and the howl that the moneyocracy raised at the slightest